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Minor Heart Attacks

I got in to the office and pulled out my iPod since I was there alone. I noticed it had run out of battery, so I plugged it into the computer to charge up a bit. I thought, lets see what I had on this. My Family Guy episodes were previously not showing up in the iPod for some reason, even though they’re definitely on there and were working at one point. So I load up iTunes. Hmm, weird, iPod doesn’t show up. I wait a while with no change. I decide to unplug it and then plug it back in. Still no difference. Ahh well, it didn’t seem like the program wanted to play, so I just left the iPod there to charge.

A little while later, I hear a little ‘beepbeepbeep’ from the general vicinity of the computers. I don’t pay it any attention as I can’t really figure out what’s making the sound. I leave and come back a little while later. One of the guys there tells me that my iPod’s beeping or something. Uh oh. I look over at the iPod and instead of you normal charging screen, it has this weird battery thing in black and white with the lightening symbol beside it. So it’s definitely not charging. I unplug it and try to take it out of that state. No luck. I try to turn it off, but all I get it this messed up, garbled screen. Panic starts to set in. After trying to turn it on and off frantically a couple times, I finally get it to turn on, only to see the screen get all pixelated and the iPod crash. Very bad I think to myself. Now, keep in mind I had the iPod connected and ‘charging’ for like an hour already at that point. If anything was the problem, I didn’t think about low battery power. I have charged the iPod on that computer before and it was fine. Well, I guess it was different that time.

I’m home now and I’m glad to say that it didn’t die on me. It just ran out of battery. I’d think I’d get a better warning than what I got. Plus, I have never seen anything run out of power like that. It looked more like it was dieing than anything else. I expected it just to turn off if it were running out of power, not crash horribly. Anyways, it seems to be okay now and that’s all that matters. Phew.

The Second heart attack came while I was at work testing and browsing. I had almost forgotten that today is the first day of the spring Intel Developer Forum (IDF). This IDF is a big one for Intel as they’re showing off their next generation architecture. Over the past couple years, Intel has gotten itself into quite a bit of trouble with AMD. Their desktop chips are generally slower, hotter and just about every way worse than the competition. To top it all off, they’ve been missing earnings expectations and dropping share to AMD. I was one of those people they lost. Well, I think they’ve won myself and quite a few other people back with today’s presentation. I won’t go into too much detail, but Intel’s next gen chips (Conroe for the desktop, Merom for the mobile space, and Woodcrest for the servers) are packing a lot of performance. In early benchmarks, Conroe’s beating out AMD’s products by quite a bit. Sure, AMD’s got AM2 coming out soon to bump up performance a bit, but it’ll be extremely difficult for them to close this large gap by the fall, if it’s all true. I couldn’t believe my eyes. AMD’s been the one that’s been doing the pummeling and when I saw the numbers, I was extremely shocked. This isn’t like a 5% outperformance. If these numbers are correct, we’re talking about 20%+. Intel was touting, before IDF, that their next gen products would be 20% faster than what AMD’ll have out when this stuff actually makes it to the market (late Q3 or thereabouts). Based on historical evidence, I was pretty skeptical. They’ve definitely proved me wrong.

EDIT: It would seem like I spoke too soon. There was some damage done to the iPod. It seems like the hard drive got corrupted. I found that out the instant I started up iTunes here. And in the iPod About menu, it says I have 22 songs on it… 😛 I’m going to have to do a restore. Damnit.